Spray-On Antenna Unveiled At Google Solve For X Conference

A start-up called Chamtech Enteprises has an answer to the problems of poor cellphone reception and other shortcomings of traditional antennas.

Steve Jurvetson/Flickr

Chamtech co-founders Anthony Sutera and Kristin Raffone-Vasquez pose with an example of their company’s spray-on antenna technology at Google’s Solve For X event last week.

The company has developed a spray-on antenna that it says is more lightweight, energy-efficient and effective than the old-school version. (Where was this stuff when the iPhone 4 came out?)

The Sandy, Utah-based start-up’s nanotechnology, unveiled last week at Google’s inaugural Solve For X gathering, can be painted onto a tree, a wall, the ground or even the back of a soldier, enabling a more portable, lightweight way to get reception for a variety of uses.

The company has already patented critical aspects of its technology and begun to sell to government customers, whom it can’t identify due to the sensitive nature of the technology’s applications.

In 2012 the company plans to expand its focus from government customers to mobile phone and medical device makers. CEO and co-founder Anthony Sutera believes the technology could be used by weather and oceanographic researchers, underwater welders, rescue workers, military special operatives in the field, airlines, and by manufacturers of cars, phones, TVs, radios and other consumer electronics.

Rhett Spencer, chief technology officer of Chamtech (who joined Sutera and co-founders Kristin Raffone-Vasquez and Eric G. Hernandez in 2011) said the spray-on technology could be applied to cell phones and make them operate with 10% better efficiency.

That could pique the interest of users of the iPhone and other smartphones frustrated by dropped calls.

“Each month, the energy savings that would impart are equal to as much power as all of wind and solar power is generated annually, in the U.S.,” Spencer said. “We’d do that 12 times over.”

Traditional antennas—the kind that receive radio and TV signals—work OK, but they’re beset by problems, Spencer said. They suck up energy, drain battery life and get too hot. They don’t send or receive signals as far or as clearly as users would like. They don’t work well under water. And they are cumbersome and hard to set up into areas stricken by disasters, or where discretion is required.

Chamtech says it solves all of the above-mentioned problems. Notably, it works well underwater—the company says it was able to send signals more than a mile underwater during testing, much more than normal antennas, and using only three watts as opposed to the thousands of watts normally required.

“Can you imagine the infrastructure side of things?” Spencer said. “Telecomm under the oceans, Internet infrastructure, ships and satellite communications in the sea– they can do it out under the water.”

The company is targeting a large market but a surprisingly fragmented one. To its knowledge, no other direct competitors exist. In the Consumer Electronics Association Electronics Industry Business Directory, 289 companies are listed as makers and sellers of antennas and related services.

Sutera’s team invented and honed their spray-on antenna in his living room about two years ago. The company is keeping the details of its technology under wraps for now, but said it is using organic elements and manipulating them to create different kinds of magnetic and radio-frequency fields.

The material allows a user to paint antennas on almost any surface and connect a cable with a flexible circuit.

Sutera and Spencer have coated their family cars’ antennas with Chamtech, as a sort of retrofit. They can now listen to Salt Lake City’s best radio stations some fifty miles outside the city, with 10,000-foot mountains in between.

The company is just about two years old, and is already approaching a cash-flow neutral position, the co-founders say. In about six months they say they will be considering their financing options, and are likely to take venture capital to help scale their technology.

Steve Jurvetson, who was in attendance at Google Solve For X, took note of Chamtech, and posted a photo of its technology to his creative commons collection on Flickr.

A video from Chamtech’s presentation at Solve For X will be available at the WeSolveForX blog this week.

Comments (5 of 16)

Oh yeah, I forgot. Now that they managed to do a VHF transmission over 14 miles using a tree... I always wondered. What sort of impedance matching do you need on a sprayed oak anyway? FFS.

9:14 am February 16, 2012

SyntaxTerror wrote:

Heh. One would think they could at least bother to learn a bit about electromagnetism before presenting their "revolutionary technology". Then at least we who know a slight bit about antenna design wouldn't feel so irritated. Oh well. Maybe I'm just a lot more stupid than I thought. Maybe it's just like he says in the presentation. Maybe you CAN just "paint a stripe down the highway" and get your broadband connectivity from there. Come on man. Some of us have IQ's better than the average piece of plywood, and even went to school. We're not that easily fooled.

12:18 am February 16, 2012

DisruptiveThinking wrote:

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity" Martin Luther King
Sutera forgot to mention antenna stencil & matching circuit without which electromagnetic waves cannot be converted to electric current, i.e. Maxwells Equations. There is no such a thing as "antenna in a can" unless Sutera proved that Maxwell is wrong!
GOOGLE has to recognize that there is a difference between "Solving for X" and hyping a technology that just doesn't work as stated.

12:13 am February 16, 2012

SHOW ME wrote:

Sounds far out based on current techiques. Regardless of opinons, feelings, knowledge in the realm of positive or negative statements made, the proof is in the pudding. Being an antenna experimenter in ham radio for the last 55 years and having seen unbelievable positive results regarding statents lke "It can't be done", let's show it off.. "Yes Virginia, there are new technologies that wil blow you away"
I am open for a documented test and result. Then I will have an opinion..

10:59 pm February 15, 2012

JamaicaJoe wrote:

I agree with Steve it is a scam. Better to invest your money in Lightsquared and feed some lawyers and lobbyists.

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